Moreso than in blogging, the first month of Twitter can be really frustrating and discouraging. In blogging, the principles are pretty easy to figure out, though it can be hard to achieve your objectives. You write a post, you promote post, you hope people respond the way you want them to. In Twitter, you sign up and your page looks like somebody spilled alphabet soup with hashtags all over your computer. People are talking to each other in ways that don’t make sense, and you don’t even know where to begin.

With that in mind, I’ve put together 40 action items that will help you (I hope) get through that first month. If you’ve been on Twitter for awhile but still feel like you’re struggling with it, take a look at these recommended action items and see if some of them might help you out.

One quick note – the action items for week 1 will almost certainly take longer than a week to get done, especially if you need to figure out answers with other people in your company. However, knowing what I know now, I highly recommend solidifying some of the things listed for week one before you jump in. Plan accordingly 🙂

Week One – Decisions, Decisions

1. Decide if you will be tweeting as an individual, as a company/brand, or a hybrid of the two

2. Decide what you will use as your username. This sounds easy, but it’s harder than you may think, especially if you and the other folks in your company want to come up with a naming convention. Also, and I say this from personal experience, don’t try to be “cute” with your choice. For example, my choice of using “RealLifeMadMan” when I first started was totally confusing and really long. Bad combo!

3. Decide what you will use for your user picture or avatar. If you are blogging on behalf of your company, this will likely be a heavily discussed subject. A lot of companies like to use a product picture or a company logo but factually, people respond better if they can see a human face.

4. Decide what you will put in your Twitter bio. You don’t have a lot of room, and if you want to get your company’s website in there, you have even less room. However, this is super duper important! Get the most important information in there first.

5. Decide what you will do for your background. This background is not something that your followers will see on a daily basis, perhaps – people only see it when they click to view your profile. However, once you’ve been on Twitter for awhile, you know what the default backgrounds look like. Showing some effort to customize your background can show that you’re really trying hard to engage and be engaging.

6. Pin down how you will talk on Twitter. I started out on Twitter trying to blog as our company. I found that it was extremely awkward saying “We just read a post.” I worried people thought I had multiple personality disorder. On the other hand, if you are partaking in a company-wide initiative, that kind of tweet may be 100% logical. Work it out before you dive in!

7. Define what your “follow” methodology will be. I can tell you that almost instantly upon signing up for Twitter, you’ll probably get 2-3 followers. There are some accounts on Twitter that have thousands of followers and no recorded tweets. What this means is that there are a lot of accounts out there who just follow people so that they can get followed back. How will you deal with situations like that?

8. Watch a few people for a few days before you start engaging. See if you can figure out how people who might be similar to you use Twitter. Are they promoting themselves a lot, or are they talking to people casually, or both? See what the expectations are in your space.

9. Avoid the temptation of starting out of the gate following 575 people. When you first sign up for Twitter, you get all kinds of categories with big names to follow. It’s super easy to follow hundreds of people right away. However, the folks that Twitter starts out recommending are people like Yoko Ono, Michael Ian Black, and the President of the United States. I know you’re a lovely person, but these folks probably will not engage with you. Hand-pick a few, but know that this will not be your base of operations.

10. Search for words that are important to you and follow people who seem to have interesting things to say about them.

Week Two – Twitter Speak!

Twitter has very peculiar shortcut words that make following conversation pretty hard when you’re first starting out. In week two, the goal is to learn about some of these and then practice using them. If you have a hard time figuring these out, feel free to ask me either here or @margieclayman.

1. Learn what a DM is

2. Learn what an RT is

3. Learn what #ff is

4. Make sure you are clear in your head about the difference between a DM and a regular tweet

5. Watch how people RT. People have their own ways of doing this and there are good reasons behind each methodology. Find out which way makes you feel most comfortable.

6. As a piggy back to number 5 (hint hint) learn how to use URL shorteners so that you can link to things on Twitter. For example, check out goo.gl or bit.ly. Watch how people use those and see if you can practice using them yourself.

7. Decide how you will thank people if someone RTs you (or says something else nice). Some people will RT any nice thing sent their way. Other people will respond in other ways out of the Twitter stream, while other people (like yours truly) usually simply say “Thanks!”

8. Observe how people do #ff (Hint, this will happen on your first Friday). There are 2 schools to this: 1 is to mention tons of people, and 1 is to mention just 1 or 2 people but explain why you are mentioning them. I prefer the latter myself.

9. Observe how people use the # symbol. Not only is this a really important thing to learn in order to use Twitter, but you are also likely to jump into some pretty good conversations by following that little symbol. *Hint: “trending topics” will give you a hint on this one.

10. Make sure you know how to talk to people on Twitter. Remember, after the @ you need to type their name exactly as it is in their handle. Otherwise, they won’t see it. To make sure you have this down, tweet out a hi to me and let me know how your action items are going so far. You’re halfway there!

Week Three: Jump into the pool

1. Introduce yourself to five people this week. If they don’t answer right away, that’s okay. Practice pushing yourself into the stream.

2. Practice promoting someone else’s blog post this week – this is very important to a lot of people who use Twitter. This will introduce you to people and will also help you practice linking to things using URL shorteners.

3. RT something someone says – and make sure you know now what RT stands for 🙂

4. Try to come up with a question that would be pertinent to other people learning Twitter or relevant to your  business niche. Questions are a great way to start conversations and meet people. Again, don’t be discouraged if you don’t get any answers – just focus on learning how to engage.

5. Try to find another person who is learning the ropes – help each other out as you go along. It’s great to have a buddy!

6. If you have someone to mention for #ff, give it a go. I have to warn you that a lot of the big names don’t like being included in those kinds of mentions just because they get absolutely flooded with them. If you do mention them, don’t be sad if you don’t get a huge thank you 🙂

7. Tweet something out that is of interest to you, whether it’s one of your own blog posts, an article you read that’s interesting, or something you learned at a webinar. If you do the latter, see if the webinar has a # so that you can tie your comment to other people doing the same thing (there, I gave you more of a hint for your week 2 homework!)

8. On Saturday night at 9 PM EST, search for #tweetdiner. This is a Twitter chat that my friend Stanford Smith (@pushingsocial) and I started. Its goal is to help people new to Twitter talk with people who are new or who have been on Twitter for awhile, and it’s also a place where you can ask questions and be assured of getting lots of help.

9. Look for a question mark and see if you can find a question you can answer. Now you can help someone else and maybe meet someone new at the same time.

10. Take stock of where you are. Do you feel like you are moving in a good direction? Send me a tweet and let me know how you are doing!

Week Four – Start building your Twitter house

1. Learn how to use lists on Twitter – you may be listed on a few already. Some are automated, some are created by other users. See if you can tell the difference. Are you ready to create your own lists yet?

2. Begin to watch the content of your tweets. The golden rule is to make sure you are promoting other people more than yourself. The unspoken rule is that interacting with people person to person is a lot more interesting than just tweeting out links. Now that you’re getting the mechanics down, learn how to translate your personality into 120 characters.

3. Try to find and join a new chat that interests you. There are tons of chats every day and night of the week. Jump in, introduce yourself, and meet some new people!

4. Try to meet 10 new people this week, either by answering questions, via chats, or through searching for terms that are important to you and seeing who is talking about them.

5. Turn your attention to beginning to build relationships now that you’re getting used to the wacky world of Twitter. If you see someone talking about a movie you love, jump in and talk to them about it. Get your humanity involved!

6. Check your “following” list. Are you staying true to what your follow-back policy was? Why or why not?

7. Take stock of the kinds of reactions you’re getting. If you are not getting a lot of traction yet, is it possible that you are not engaging enough? Does your profile not say enough about you? If things are going really well, try to isolate things that are working well for you and keep those going!

8. Try to introduce two people to each other this week. If you don’t know enough people yet, that’s okay. Keep this one in mind though. Introducing people is a great way to start building a community.

9. Try to find a person who is newer than you are now to the world of Twitter. Try to help them out.

10. Let me know (if you could) how this program worked for you! Are you feeling okay about Twitter after your first month or are you still kind of unsure? I’d love to get your feedback.

A few days ago, my good friend Joe Ruiz (@SMSJoe) asked me a question. He asked me how I stay connected with everyone that I do. It’s a question I get now and then. As serendipity would have it, the answer plays perfectly into this weekend’s #usblogs theme, which is how to improve Klout offline.

A bit about Klout

Klout seems to be the topic that won’t die. I am as guilty as everybody. I’ve written about my distaste for the whole concept of Klout, I’ve done a presentation exploring Klout with a more unbiased approach, and now I’m doing this post. Just this week, Mark Schaefer quoted an excellent exploration of Klout from the Boston Globe, Trey Pennington wrote a satirical post about things that are wrong with Klout, and Mack Collier wrote a post taking off on Trey’s post.

That’s a lot of content – and this is by no means an exhaustive search.

Here’s the main thing that bothers me about Klout. Despite all arguments to the contrary, it seems that Klout scores rise the more you tweet. Icing on that cake is how often you get retweeted. I’ve been taking a bit of time off Twitter over the last week or so, and my Klout score (I just checked) has dropped 3 points. In essence, to the point of the #usblogs theme, to get klout, simply being online is a good start.

I have a problem with that.

It’s about real connections

I don’t want to downplay the importance of Twitter for today’s online marketers and business people. It’s immensely important, not to mention pretty darned fun and interesting a lot of the time. But (and to quote Pee Wee Herman, everyone has a big but), you find that the more you get connected on a real basis with people, the less you center your communications on Twitter.

A lot of my communicating with people now happens on their blog sites, on my blog site, in emails, on Facebook, on the phone, or all kinds of other places. We wave to each other in the stream, but if you were to judge my relationships with some of my best buddies, like Suzanne Vara and Maya Paveza, merely by what you see in the Twitter stream, you would probably not think there was much going on there.

That is really how I stay connected with people, and I think that’s how people stay connected to me as well. It’s really not a conscious thing for me. I have been fortunate enough to build relationships via Twitter that I truly care about, so following up with that person is a pleasure, not something I check off of a checklist. Does that connection mean that we support each others’ blog posts? Sure. Does that mean that we tweet each other when we can? Yep. But Twitter – the thing Klout measures most – that’s not where the heart of the online world is headed. To me, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the online world – that’s your really nice car. But you’ve got to be going somewhere exciting for it to be truly worthwhile in the end.

Building Klout offline

Klout emphasizes what it calls “influence,” which has become a tired and controversial buzz word in this space. In my experience and in watching other people who just continue to grow and blossom online, influence is a side effect – a happy coincidence. It’s the relationships and what you do to keep and grow those relationships that really matter. It’s reading a post for someone before they publish it. It’s promoting someone’s e-book to help them out. It’s checking on someone who seems down. All of the things that Klout can’t touch and doesn’t try to touch are what matter the most to me. It may not all be offline, but it’s out of the range of Klout’s radar.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your take!

Image by Franque de Win. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Franque

This is post number five in a series of posts from Online Marketing Strategist Tommy Walker. If you have questions, leave a comment here or visit with Tommy on Twitter at@tommyismyname.

Today I found a really interesting post by Angie Schottmuller on Jay Baer’s site, Convinceandconvert.com. The article is called 7 ways to thank someone for a retweet. Angie makes a lot of really good points and a lot of excellent recommendations, but I see things a bit differently, so I thought I would tack on my perspective. Here’s hoping you join the conversation!

Are you being genuine or are you being a braggart?

It’s very easy to identify things that rub you the wrong way in Twitter world. That’s why you see so many posts like, “Calling BS on this” or “Why I hate people who…xyz”. Once you do that though, it’s sometimes hard to tell if you are actually executing an activity that drives someone else nuts.

For me, showing gratitude on Twitter always feels like walking on thin ice. As Angie points out in her post, if you say “Thank you for the RT!” a million times a day, a few things can happen. First, it can look like you’re just trying to fill your stream with all of the wonderful RTs you’ve gotten. Second, the actual thank you can start to look like it’s playing second fiddle to your self-promotion, which can be icky (that’s a professional term). If you tack on a link to your post every time you say thank you to someone, the waters start to look like they could catch on fire for all of the ick (that’s a Northeast Ohio reference, btw).

Where I diverge from Angie’s perspective

All of the above I agree with Angie on 100%. Where I kind of wade off into a different pond is how I approach saying thank you. Angie notes in her post that there are other ways to say thank you rather than just saying, like a robot, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” True, but do you still need to type out some version of gratitude in a tweet if someone supports you? I feel the answer is yes.

In particular, I strongly disagree with the idea of retweeting a retweet. As I noted in the comments over on Angie’s post, the RTing of Retweets may be my biggest pet peeve in Twitter world. It just gets downright ridiculous sometimes. You’ve probably seen this scenario before, for example:

Someone mentions you and a few other people for follow Friday.

One of the other people mentioned retweets that tweet. OK, fine.

Then the original poster retweets the retweet because they are mentioned with an #ff. Well, that’s kind of silly isn’t it?

To me, retweeting a retweet doesn’t show a lot of humanity. It’s pushing the Retweet button, and it can sometimes make you look silly if you don’t look carefully at what you’re doing.

So how do I say thank you?

I have a few rules that I follow when thanking people.

1. I give priority to people who add a comment or a thought along with a tweet of my post. This tells me that they actually read the post and formed an opinion, which (lord knows) takes a lot of time. I want to make sure I acknowledge those folks by name, individually.

2. If a lot of people retweet my post over a short period of time, I will group them together so that I am not saying thank you 27 times in an hour. Well, I don’t usually get 27 RTs in an hour, but you know what I mean!

3. If someone retweets my post AND leaves a comment, or retweets my post and then starts to follow, I try to thank them for both actions at once.

In essence, for me, expressing gratitude on Twitter is quite simply more about the person you are thanking, less about you. Following the person is good advice. Adding the person to a list is good advice, but you never quite know how people will react to things like that. To me, it’s always a safe bet, a human bet, to just say thank you, and try to personalize it.

Five easy ways to personalize a thank you

To avoid sounding like a thank you robot, I try to personalize my tweets where I’m thanking people so that they know it’s really about them. Here are five ways to go about that.

1. Thanks for the RT! I haven’t talked to you lately. How are you?

2. Thank you for retweeting my post. I’m heading over to your blog later today!

3. Thanks for the RT – I really appreciate it!

4. Thank you for the RT and for the great comment you left. I appreciate both!

5. Thanks. By the way, your post inspired me to write that, so thank you for the inspiration!

You see? You are really talking to the person that way, rather than just saying “Hey thanks.” To me, that avoids the “spammy” problem Angie wants to help you avoid.

So those are some of my thoughts on how to say thank you on Twitter. Where do you come in on the issue? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and don’t forget to visit Angie’s post as well!

Image by sebile akcan. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/sebileakc

This post is part of the #letsblogoff collaborative blog community.

A few days ago, my friend Stan (@pushingsocial) published a post called What if you only had 20 posts left? The post is about Wael Ghonim, a man who started a Facebook page that helped inspire the revolution in Egypt. The point Stan makes is that we really don’t live our blogs to the fullest, right? We put in content, and we shovel it out, and we entirely take it for granted. We may not always put our best work out there.

Now, Stan could have just created a post that said that stuff. But instead, he overlaid his message with the story of Wael Ghonim. It’s a great story, and a great technique.

“Stogging”

One could say that storytelling via blog posts is an increasingly common recommendation. If you skim the most popular posts at Copyblogger.com, for example, you see advice on how to make your copy sticky, how to envelope your readers in what you’re saying, and how to infuse your personality into everything you write. One of the most popular posts, and one of my favorites from 2010, uses the story of Eminem to make immensely important points about blogging.

But why do we need these stories? Why can’t we just take good advice and motivate ourselves to use it?

Five reasons to tell a story in your blog posts

Here are five reasons why I think people gravitate towards stories in blog posts.

1. When a writer tells a story, he or she edges a bit more into being who they really are. The temptation to be entirely button down and professional seems to drift away, and in its place is a real live human being sharing thoughts and experiences.

2. Stories prove we’re not making it up. If Stan had written the post he did about how a single post or action can create a revolution without the story he wove into the post, it would not have had the punch. But he told not just a story, but a true story. A current events story. We now see that he has a really important point to make backed up by reality.

3. Stories build bridges. We all come to our blogs with our own personal experiences, our own “baggage,” as it were. By telling a story, whether it’s about ourselves or someone else, we build a bridge between ourselves and our readers. “Here,” we seem to say. “You may not have lived my life, so let me tell you a little about it so we can start in the same place.”

4. Stories can be passed on. There are so many tidbits of wisdom floating around in the online world. Stories, however, well, they are like snowflakes. No two are exactly alike. They stick with us and we want to share them. We want to see how other people react to them. We want to see if they are moved the same way we were.

5. The Bait and Switch. A lot of bloggers will approach blogs from the standpoint of being an expert. “Here’s why you should do things my way, and here’s why I’m right and you’re dumb.” You’ve seen those posts before, I’m sure. If you tell a story though, you lure readers in. It’s like fishing – you’ve got a real nice and juicy worm just hanging out there, and people can’t resist clicking “Read more.” Then, you bring in the moral of the story, just like Aesop, and the person has learned your feelings about something without even realizing it.

You and stogging

Do you tell a lot of stories in your posts? Do you try to bring in other people, other experiences, and other perspectives, or do you keep the spotlight on the point you’re trying to get across? Have you found that people respond better when you weave a story into your regularly scheduled programming, or do you think this is all a bit of hogwash?

I’d love to hear your story!

image by Andre Larsson. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Didi90